>> the biggest names in retail would be tj maxx they end up at a company like tj maxx and the consumert treasure hunt of going in there and trying to find the diamond in the rough that's where we would be in retail. >> all right great thoughts this morning in the markets. we appreciate it gentlemen, that does it for worldwide exchange this morning. squawk box will pick up coverage next but stocks right now are showing they could have just about fractional, maybe gains and losses, squawk box begins right now. >> good morning. we'll show you the premarket moves and bring you results from home depot expected any minute now. >> new economic reforms are taking effect in china today they could help beijing weather an extended trade war with the united states and the streaming wars are heating up. a new report says apple is ramping up it's spending on original content, that's good. and working to beat disney's new streaming service to market. it's tuesday, august 20th, 2019, and squawk box begins right now. ♪ >>> good morning, everybody, welcome to squawk box here on cnbc we're live from the

again, tj maxx, my favorite retailer. i think they have the treasure hunt philosophy there, that people love. they keep growing stores and they too are expanding into china. >> jeff you got to stop going through my pantry, swedish fish, totally true, man. tune fish. it is great. deirdre: scott, thank you very much. connell: that was unnecessary. tobacco giants, philip morris, altria, this was another big story a potential blockbuster deal gerri willis is here to talk more about. gerri? reporter: looks like philip morris is in discussions about purchase of altria in all stock share of equals. why are they doing this? facing shrinking cigarette sales in part because of health concerns out there. it could take a long time to get this deal through regular latetores. these two companies were together a decade ago. now they're trying to get back together. we'll look at boeing shares. why? because american airlines are saying they expect, they are confident in fact that boeing 737 max aircraft will fly later this year, possibly

the parent company of tj maxx and home goods warned that third quarter profits will come in below estimatesan increase in competition. >>> and in washington the focus is very much on the economy n right now, e though the president has said we're far from a recessi. he admitte today that he is examining a number of stimulus meases including more tax cuts. ayman javers is at the white house for us tonight. >> reporter: some back and forth over the past 24 hours here at the white house over the idea o a payroll tax cut. yesterday the white house denying the news report that suggested that the white house wanted to move forward on a payroll tax cut. weay, t the president said he's considering it. here is what the president said today talking to reporters in the oval office, and also mentioning the idea ofnding capital gains, another tax cut sroposal the white house considering. >> a lot of people have been talking about indexingy for m nkars, and it is something that i am certainly tg about. i can say that a majority of the people in the white house at the level that does this kind of thing, th

that would be home depot, kohl's and the parent company of tj maxx, tjx. of all, overall, what do these numbers tell us from these retailers? what do they tell us about the economy? >> i think it tells you the consumer is still spending money but more importantly, the read-through on home depot's announcement is they say they don't see tariffs hurting business yet. i think that's an important point to look at there. you look at home depot, people are still going in, people still want to fix up their homes. the prices of homes are at the highest levels they have ever been so people want to invest in that asset. stuart: $fi5 gain is a nice gai. dow stock, too. what do the retailers tell us about the state of the economy? >> i think it's giving positive overall reading because you have some that are not doing well, kohl's got hit, tjx surprisingly got hit because they have been pretty strong. but you look at walmart, look at some of the other big names, the people that are doing retail well are doing it really well. i think the mall-based stores are in a bit

well, as soon as the numbers hit the tape we will get them to you with full analysis, kohl's and tj maxx up 9 and a quarter. take a look at the numbers yesterday at the close, president trump pushing the federal reserve for a bigger rate cut, the president asking for 100-basis point cut, criticize federal chair jarome powell. mornings with maria begins right now. ♪ >> big show this morning, joining the version this morning jonas max harris is here, real clear politics cofinder and president tom beven, great to see you, guys, this morning. >> good morning. maria: waiting on home depot and also jack keane on hong kong this morning. house committee service's membe

i picked it, i thought they were going to pull through, i loved this model tj maxx uses, i love tj maxxhe treasure hunt model. jc penney assured me they were going to do that. they were going to execute it and i looked at that -- david: did they let you down? >> they let me down. david: oh, man! >> for that alone -- >> i drag that penney stigma around. david: look at the dow again. they are kind of stuck in that range between 175 and 220. it's trading down now about 210 points. thanks to everybody. that was a great session. >>> quick check on the big board as we saw, 214 on the dow. the nasdaq is down percentage-wise, just about the same amount, about .8 on the downside. >>> california raking in billions of dollars from big tech but as we just mentioned, state law makers there are continuing to go after these companies with new regulations. could all these restrictive new laws cause a tech exodus out of california? what would that mean for the state's budget? we will be asking that question. >>> au anheuser busch rolling oa new line of drinks in order to attract millenials who have ditc

coming along or you see the same thing i bet you any day of the week when costco reports or target or tj maxx or dollar general or anyone who is with the market right now then you see the consumer is out there shopping. she's simply moving away from the mall and on to the internet and moving away from apparel and towards hard-lines and experiences with her money. but boy, is she spending it. charles: there's a mall near me that when you go inside, it always seems empty, but the parking lot is always full. everyone's at the restaurants. i'm looking at the july data. food services, restaurants up significantly. we're actually spending more money to eat outside of the home than we are in the home. to me that's got to be the ultimate consumer discretionary item. >> absolutely. again, people have a lot of money. they are spending it. they are spending it on experiences like eating out. they are spending it on hard-lines. you see that consistently in the numbers that you get out of the discount chains, the numbers you see out of the home improvement chains. you continue to see a lot of money out th

retail earnings this week, is, you know, where you thought there would be strength -- let's talk about tj maxxeverybody is talking about how well they're doing in this environment, retailers are not doing well but they have the deals and everybody will go there yet they didn't do well then the other companies come out and where you thought they would do bad, the stocks did fairly well. so i think it is more comment on the confusion that's going on in the market we're in this kind of period where we don't have a lot of clarity on a lot of different things, and it is just how people are trading it has less to do with what the u.s. consumer is doing and more to do with how stocks are trading at this point in time. >> so, i mean, look, the consumer is going to get a tail wind from the housing market they're going to get a benefit from lower interest rates, and as far as i'm concerned first of all in the broader picture consumer confidence, if you look at the correlation of consumer confidence in the housing bureau index, they're closely aligned until it breaks down, i think the consumer's in fine

we also had tj maxx which had a lot of trouble. that stock in the red. so really been mixed reports for retailers. back to you. melissa: gerri, thank you. our panel is back. gerry, let me ask you, apple reportedly committing to more than $6 billion in original programing ahead of the launch of apple tv plus. what do you think about this in terms of the streaming wars? they want to get it out before disney, whether i'm selling a show, or i'm a viewer, it sounds pretty good to me? >> i think apple knows that if you look at the iphone numbers, the ipad numbers, the watch numbers, not that great. they have to go elsewhere. the good news services are way, way up. they're trying some other things. whether or not they will hit big i don't know. i worry about the whole streaming thing because how many eyes are there in this country that can watch all this stuff? there are so many different parts out there. i got to believe somebody is going to get bought. i think disney will do well. i think netflix may have problems on price. netflix may have to lower price tha

you have strength coming from tj maxx and ross, the bigger discounters.ave amazon doing quite well or improving their clothing. then you've got walmart and target that are increasing their designs, their fashion when it comes to clothing, so that's taking away from some of these bigger department stores and then last two things i want to mention, you have international tourism that is slowly starting to slow down, the global growth that we keep talking about, that's starting to weigh on retailers and these looming tariffs. even though macy's's ceo is not planning on increasing prices any time soon, it's having an effect. walmart out tomorrow. connell: that's a big one. we will watch what walmart has to say. they are almost like an economic report when it reports its earnings to some degree. like the american consumer is holding up and -- for now, and now clearly some concern about the future even if macy's has some company-specific issues. thank you. >>> from retail we move to gm and ford for a moment. those companies are saying they are now planning for

macy's down again, target, down again, tj maxx, tjx, i should say.em down except for target which is up 2%. >>> let's deal with walmart. they are up today, 5.5%. they say they made a lot of money and that the american consumer is doing just fine. is that an economic indicator? >> well, there's a lot of interesting news on walmart. first, we are looking at a 6.2% increase actually from amazon in this space and 5.2% something for walmart. walmart's had very strong growth in the food services business. that's up 53%. margins for walmart are about 24% relative to about 43% for amazon. very strong product. the interesting thing about them, a lot of talk has been about the job, you know, the rates for the employees. they have actually dropped employees. they have 2.2 million employees. they actually dropped about 100,000 to 130,000 employees when you back out the m & a for the last year. amazon is growing employees by about 500,000 the last five years. we will hear more about this story next year when people are looking at job growth and walmart which has

tj maxx", even though they don't have earnings from her face still guided stronger for the remainder stronger on the numbers strong enough to report, all have much better guidance going forward. these retailers are very confident in cap target, 19%. >> what i have found remarkable, traffic. going into the stores, up 2.4%. the sales are the highest in decades. what's helping them is, you can go to the store or drive by and pick it up, people are not picking up a package inventors checking something else out. that's what they call the great thing about creative destruction, two years ago everyone so amazon for walmart because of the enemy, amazon. >> solvent because of amazon for they learned how to adapt and both of them are trading at all-time highs. >> people on the left were there think they are living paycheck to paycheck, economy is bad news for ordinary people. that is nonsense. >> we had an update where people are working to or more people present address, it's gone up a bit, there's no doubt. some people because they want to because of certain flexibility. there's some pockets

macy's, kohl's, nordstrom, target, tj maxx. tjx, i should say. clobbered.way, national retail federation president matt shay will join us shortly. he says the trade war with china is creating a lot of uncertainty for our economy. he's on the show at around 11:30 eastern this morning. >>> moving on, another look at big tech. you also like microsoft, right? >> i do. stuart: it's not exposed to the trade situation? >> part of it -- stuart: i own it. >> part of it is because they just signed a really big deal in india with reliance industry. that actually allows them to enter the cloud market. that's one of the biggest cloud markets there are. the other piece, they are hitting about a trillion market cap yet are still growing in double digits. that's happening because of cloud, because of office 365, it's also happening because they are able to execute on even xbox so they have managed to turn everything around. stuart: by the way, microsoft is down less than all the other big techs. that backs up your argument. what about apple? we had someone on the show yest

tj max right? kohl's and macy's, they can participate tariffs on all these goods coming in. they're not going to sell them those goods are going toned up at t.j. maxx they will sell them because people love going there for the treasure hunt experience beyond that there's an opportunity in companies like lulu that's a canadian-based company, not going to be hit by the tariffs. strong brand loyalty i was just on vacation in california all my girls wanted to do was go to the lulu store. people go there, they continue to buy it even if prices go up they're going to continue to spend money there. >> you were i can mag the point earlier they're the staple retailer which are doing okay and then the department stores that are not going to be able to weather the tariffs very well. >> listen, we don't even have to talk about the -- literally year after year the last five years one of the worse charts in all the sectors of the market, it's a disaster the issue with some of these big box guys like walmart and target and costco is their margins are really narrow. that's a big issue that being said, i'd rather be there. just one other point i think is really imp